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Re: fingers / toes

Originally Posted by alikim

Is it OK to say that "a human has 20 fingers" or you need to specify that "a human has 10 fingers and 10 toes"?

A human doesn't have 20 fingers. You can say that a human has 20 digits, or 20 phalanges. But a toe isn't a finger. And a finger isn't a toe - though in lesser mammals, we call the analogous structures 'toes'. Eg. a cat has 18 toes.

Re: fingers / toes

Originally Posted by Raymott

But a toe isn't a finger. And a finger isn't a toe.

Well, it was a linguistic question, not biological.

Biological terminology depends on language, in some languages fingers and toes are always called "fingers", in this sense toe is a finger and vice versa, so I was just curious how the things are in English.